Hi, people,
so yesterday, after traditional battles with deploy scripts, we released 0.7.4. The post-release letargy didn't last long this time (exactly 4 minutes 33 seconds, I measured it) and we are getting on with 0.8.0 and 0.7.5.

Slpwnd is working on the trailer and it is starting to look very cool, first thing I thought when seeing his factory was "Wow, I want to play this game!" :-)
Kovarex is hunting some of the remaining bugs, laser fire and cursing biters can be heard out of his den.
Albert and I are working on the new terrains. Albert is painting some awesome sand dunes and I came back from the gory details of various tileable noises back into factorio code itself, working on tilings for the new terrains.

"This is Construct, our loading program..."

tiling.png (283.44 KiB) Viewed 15105 times

Today we also discussed the realistic pipes again and it turns out, we know much less about it than would be necessary to implement it, so if anyone is a powerplant designer IRL, please share some wisdom with us ( https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=5&t=1515 ) :). Anyway, if this ever got into Factorio, I'd really love to have my super advanced power plant with regenerative cycle and steam reheat :-)

Today we also discussed the realistic pipes again and it turns out, we know much less about it than would be necessary to implement it, so if anyone is a powerplant designer IRL, please share some wisdom with us ( https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=5&t=1515 ) . Anyway, if this ever got into Factorio, I'd really love to have my super advanced power plant with regenerative cycle and steam reheat

so what do you exactly want to know about this stuff?
im working at a gas-powered power-plant. but since i work at a (quite big) energy corporation, i know about coal powered plants as well..
since they are all working with the same principle - the only difference is really the fuel and the exhaust-cleaning systems.

Today we also discussed the realistic pipes again and it turns out, we know much less about it than would be necessary to implement it, so if anyone is a powerplant designer IRL, please share some wisdom with us ( https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=5&t=1515 ) . Anyway, if this ever got into Factorio, I'd really love to have my super advanced power plant with regenerative cycle and steam reheat

so what do you exactly want to know about this stuff?
im working at a gas-powered power-plant. but since i work at a (quite big) energy corporation, i know about coal powered plants as well..
since they are all working with the same principle - the only difference is really the fuel and the exhaust-cleaning systems.

Basically -- how can the turbine extract a lot of energy by decreasing pressure, if heating is done at constant pressure and the pump only puts in a little energy.

Basically -- how can the turbine extract a lot of energy by decreasing pressure

Expansion! Super-heated steam expands violently when sprayed from a nozzle into a low-pressure environment like a turbine housing. The higher the steam temperature; the more expansion the steam undergoes when it enters the low-pressure area.

Since a cubic foot of water can generate up to 1800 cubic feet of steam, the feedwater pump can be tiny compared to the turbine/boiler. Pushing a very low-volume, even at high pressure, doesn't require much of a pump or much energy. They also use little tricks like feedwater injectors to reduce the feedwater pressure needed to get water into the boiler.

It enables to show, what happens with gas, if you change its state isobar (constat pressure), isochor (constant volume) and isoterm (constant temp). "Anfangszustand" means "starting state" and "Endzustand" end-state. The diagrams show, that it is 3-dimensional dependencies.
I mean, most other stuff in the app should be translateable.

I tried to reverse the process, by changing the parameters, but I think they are only fake.

a few notes here and there.
the pressure that most steam-turbines work with is close to 200 bar (2500 to 2800 psi) and the steam temperature rarely exceeds 530°C (930°F),
thats simply because of material-restrictions in the turbine-construction and other parts.
a steam turbine consists of 3 chambers. high,-middle and low-pressure for maximum efficency.
however at the end the steam needs to condensate since steam cant be pumped.
that leads to "small" pumps. were talking about steam-engine-powered pumps because its not possible to handle engines of that size with electricity.(even in small power plants they have to pump a few hundred tons/hour).

as for the boilers: the concept that can be used ingame is pretty realistic since it is possible to REHEAT already used steam (thats a basic construction-principle to maximize efficiency).
since it was already discussed that the need for electricity/whatever to work the pumps is to complicated (or walking in a circle) i guess this aspect can be ignored.
what i would like to see: a water-cycle. for example with a condensator that can be connected to the pumps and at the other end to the steam-engines, increasing their power output. with the addition that it makes it mor complicated to build in exchange for more power (that may not be realistic, but interesting in a game-play matter)

gr0mpel wrote:as for the boilers: the concept that can be used ingame is pretty realistic since it is possible to REHEAT already used steam (thats a basic construction-principle to maximize efficiency).

Reheating is not possible in current system. Because steam engines do not remove heat, but water. It might look like it, when engines remove water faster then boilers can provide max temperature water.